Boy Friend

Between Those Two Words, a Guy Can Get Crushed

(Yvetta Fedorova - For The Washington Post)

The worst kind of temptation, as Tantalus found out, is the sort that's closest, the fruit that's barely out of reach. This holds true for infatuation, which is why the cruelest crush is one between friends.

We call this the friend-crush, and it happens when one member of a platonic relationship secretly harbors a desire for something more. The friend-crush survives through crying jags and significant others and drunken walks home. And when it ends, it often goes out with a humiliating fizzle, accompanied by something like, "I can't date you, Jason/Bobby/Steven/Mike. I value our friendship too much."

Apparently, no one talks about the friend-crush, about the fact that it's quite common, that it usually seems to be the guy doing the crushing, and that it is endemic to high schools and college campuses. Last autumn a college kid named Matt Brochu wrote about it in his school newspaper, and it was as if he'd just translated the Rosetta Stone of adolescent longing.

When Brochu's column ran in the University of Massachusetts paper in November, a cry of recognition arose from the young people of this nation. At last, someone had given voice to their silent suffering. Through instant messaging, the column spread from Amherst, Mass., to Boston to Austin to Muncie to Berkeley. It spread to England and Belgium and to a Navy enlistee in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and to a woman in eastern Canada who "almost cried" when she read it.

The Web site for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, where Brochu's column was posted, was flooded. A typical column gets at most 1,000 readers in one month. Brochu's got 570,000 hits from November to March.

The column was an anatomy of Brochu's real-life crush, embellished by past experiences and by a sprinkling of imagination. Brochu, now a 21-year-old senior, fell into infatuation last summer, after he became friends with a girl from his home town of East Longmeadow, Mass. She was three years younger, an incoming freshman at UMass and -- the way Brochu tells it -- burdened by a boyfriend who wasn't good enough for her. (They never are.) She was flirtatious and beautiful and had an air of innocence. She and Matt wound up in psychology class together, where they chatted through each seminar and Brochu's roommate took notes for both of them. Then she broke up with her boyfriend.

Brochu started writing. When he finished, the column was effusive and tragic the way love paeans usually are. It was called "What she doesn't know will kill you," and it was written in the second person and filled with references specific to his slice of generation. You met her a few months ago, and somehow she managed to seep into your subconscious like that "Suga how you get so fly" song. . . . She's gorgeous, but gorgeous is an understatement. More like you're startled every time you see her because you notice something new in a "Where's Waldo" sort of way.

It described how a crush works on memory, causing the desirer to remember everything ever told to him by the object of his desire. It talked about the guy's everyday indecisions, such as what to get the girl for her birthday and whether to instant-message her at any given moment. It talked of "that cute little scar on her shoulder," and her love for calzones, and her utter obliviousness to his ardor. It talked of her boyfriend, the "tool," who didn't appreciate her.

Collegian Web site readers are allowed to write responses to articles. Most columns get three or four. Brochu's column got over 500, nearly all in gratitude and praise. Eventually, the exhausted editor running the feedback section told readers they couldn't write in any more. But the old messages are still up there, steeped in the drama of young love.

"Thank you for showing me that I'm not alone on this in this crazy world," wrote someone under the name "Hobbes."

"By the time I finished it, I was speechless and light-headed from the truthfulness of it all," wrote "Abel."

"i laughed when i saw resemblances of myself, yet inside i was really crying," wrote "Krunk."

Readers were inspired by the end of Brochu's column, a romantic call to arms that included a blank space where each reader could write the name of his beloved. The last lines are these:

Now cut this out, fill in her name, and give it to her, coward. Just let me know how it works out.

"Damn, I wish I could be so eloquent," wrote "P. Che." "Maybe it really is worth a shot no?"

Brochu thought so. He'd made up his mind to tell the girl.

Unlike the infatuation from afar, the friend-crush is especially powerful because the romance seems so almost possible. By its very nature, the friend-crush encourages Talmudic dissections of the beloved's psyche, hashing and rehashing of missed opportunities, optimistic interpretations of neutral behavior.

There's Brad Clark, 17, of Glen Burnie, who years ago became friends with a girl he had a crush on and tried to ask her out via a passed note. She wrote back, "I think you're really cool so we can be friends but I have a boyfriend."

For a week, Clark listened to moody Dashboard Confessional songs and analyzed the note over and over. He considered the phrase, But I have a boyfriend.

"Have. That's not a very strong word there," he thought.

There's Carl M. Schwarzenbach, a 17-year-old high school junior in Southwick, Mass., who had a crush on a certain girl since the first moment he saw her, 21/2 years ago, on the first day of school. It was the beginning of fifth period, choir class, at 12:03 p.m., as he recalls. He was a freshman. She was a senior. She was blond and beautiful and wearing a black tank top and jeans. They became close. Schwarzenbach says they kissed a few times, but they stayed just friends.

"She always had this mind-set that she was afraid of commitment and she didn't want to commit to anything 'cause she was afraid she would hurt me," Schwarzenbach says.

Matt Brochu wrote the UMass column that prompted hundreds to write back about friend-crushes. (John Henry Kleschinsky)

When Brochu's column came out, Schwarzenbach e-mailed it to the girl, with her name filled out in the blank. She's in college now, and they haven't seen each other much. She e-mailed him back, in pink, as always.

"She just said, uh, that it was really, really sweet and it made her smile," Schwarzenbach says. "I think it might have brought us a little closer."

The friend-crush is largely a phenomenon of adolescence, when hope is more persuasive then experience. Though it happens in high school, it blossoms in college, when a new culture shakes everything up. College is when you consider important questions like: Is there such a thing as a platonic back rub? Is there such a thing as a long-distance boyfriend?

It might have to do with the coed dorm setting, where near-strangers are thrust into an intimacy previously reserved for family. (Suitemates pass by in towels.) It might be the fluidity of college dating, in which nothing is defined, and in any case, no one knows what the definitions mean. Are you friends? Are you taking it slow? One person's "seeing each other" is another person's "dating each other," which is another person's "hanging out," which is another person's "friends with benefits."

Consider the experience that countless college guys have had. At a party, a certain girl -- one you thought was taken -- seems to be flirting with you. She takes your arm when you walk her home. The next day, when you instant-message her with the vaguely suggestive "I had a nice time last night," she says, "Me, too," and then mentions her boyfriend. What could it possibly mean?

Brian Murphy, a freshman at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, met a girl from his dorm on move-in day, and they became best friends. They walked to class together, ate lunch and dinner together, went to parties together. After parties, they had a ritual where they would go back to her room and cuddle. Murphy fell for her, hard. He says it was the kind of situation where -- forced to choose between going out with guy friends and staying in with her to watch a chick flick -- he'd watch the chick flick.

But she had a boyfriend of three years.

Murphy and the girl shared one guilty kiss, then they went home for Christmas break. During the break, Murphy read Brochu's column, and inspired by it, resolved to tell the girl how he felt. He made a scrapbook filled with pictures of the two of them. When they came back to school, he gave her the scrapbook and confessed his feelings.

"Get over me," she said. She said she had realized how much she loved her boyfriend.

Murphy was crushed.

"It's definitely the first time that I ever fell in love," he says.

Love is like wealth, or the world food supply. Some people hog it; others get nothing at all. To scroll down the feedback column below Matt Brochu's article is to realize how much love goes unrevealed, unrecognized and unrequited. If only there were some mechanism for spreading love around, everybody could get enough.

Instead, the postings sit static in cyberspace, declarations of love to people who may never read them.

"I've seen the sun rise over the mountains of Vermont and seen it set over the Caribbean. I've swam with tropical fish and seen the view from the top of Katahdan. But none of that even begins to compare to how beautiful she is."

"Katie Norris -- if you ever read this, you know how I felt about you during that first month when I was in Mexico . . . look me up sometime. . . . I'd still like to try again."

"Shandie although i only just met you it seems like u are the one . . . dang girl ur perfect"

Some female readers, impressed by Brochu's way with words, try to woo the author himself.

"As a woman that constantly prays for a man with those sensitive values and beautiful words, you definitely took the right approach with this lucky lady. And as a little side note . . . if she didn't think she was as lucky as everyone thought she was; I would love to hear back from you."

A reader incensed by the number of girls praising Brochu writes:

"Girls, stop saying you hope to find someone like the guy who wrote this . . . you already have but you call them your best friend and what you don't know is that they are In Love with you."

The feedback column is a strange sort of conversation, taking place among 500 strangers over the course of months. Readers post responses that reference other posts and debate the efficacy of Brochu's just-tell-her approach. All the theories on love present themselves. There are the cynics. They write that if romance hasn't happened yet, it isn't meant to. They suggest that women want jerks more than "nice guys," and they question whether it's even possible to move from friendship to love. They offer cautionary tales.

"I guess all good stories aren't supposed to have a happy ending and all heroes are not supposed to win," writes a fellow named "Ryan," who posts a harrowing account of running two miles in the rain to a woman's house to declare his love. The woman listened, then told him they were better off as friends. "It was a long walk home that day, the rain. . . . laughing at me in a steady and harsh flow."

But there are more romantics than cynics. A girl writes in to reconsider the "dateability" of guys who are "right under my nose." Another writes in to say she knows a guy has a crush on her and she thinks she feels the same way, but she needs to take it slow. Some confess their love to the people they like, and contacted later, two guys say it actually worked out.

Someone named "Kate" writes:

"As heard one thousand times before . . . amazing article. But, answer us all one question, because we're all dying to know . . . did you get the girl?!"

The answer is: After the story ran, Brochu sent the link over instant messaging to his crush. She wrote back, asking who the column was about. He sent her a cautious, rambling set-up, which he saved, along with her responses, so that he could analyze them later. His set-up started like this:

"First off, I'm not really obsessed with this girl, I'm just interested, and I have been since the day I met her, and she doesn't have to worry about letting me down easy, b/c I'm not the type of person to let things get awkward and let it ruin the friendship we already have, b/c she's gotta realize. . . ."

It went on like this for a while. Then: "So yeah, it's you, sorry I had to make things all weird."

She called it the "sweetest thing" she'd ever read and the "nicest thing" that had ever happened to her, and they agreed to sleep on it and talk the next day.

She called him.

"You never know whether to believe it or not, whether she was letting me down nicely," Brochu says. She talked about her long relationship with her ex-boyfriend, and how she didn't want to get into something serious, and how she felt she'd get too serious with Brochu.

"She said that she could only hang out with people in that way that she couldn't see herself getting to like," Brochu says.

It hurt, but the strange thing is, it hurt only for two days and then Brochu was over it. He says it was as if a light switch inside of him was turned off. He wonders now how much of the crush was just him enjoying the chase, the thrill of the unattainable.

"I think it goes to show that my crush was just building upon itself from me not knowing," he says. "It was completely constructed."

They're still friends, and Brochu says he's totally over her.

Anyway, he's dating someone now. Or, seeing someone. He doesn't quite know what to call it. At the very least, they're hanging out.